Re: [xtm-wg] Trying to locate zoological taxonomy

[Peter Kaminski <kaminski@istori.com>]

Murray Altheim writes,

>Anyone know where I might locate a electronic text source of the complete
>zoological taxonomy?

What an interesting question!  I suspect this is rather like asking for the 
complete global phone book; one can posit such a canonical list, but in 
practice it gets detailed and complicated quickly.  (And I thought the DNS 
was complicated! :)

I don't know the answer, but being a brave soul, that didn't stop me.  I 
can point out some interesting things I found while looking.

The "codes of nomenclature" which govern the syntax and semantics of 
biological names (print only, for $$, looks like): 
<http://www.biosis.org.uk/zrdocs/codes/codes.htm>.

Species 2000 <http://www.sp2000.org/> is acting as the focal point for 
collecting all species names.  [Check out the international workshop 
starting today(!): <http://www.sp2000.org/BBSRC_ITIS_wkshp.html>.  Keynote: 
"The challenge: A biodiversity information infrastructure".]

I take it individual taxa are maintained by specialists interested in, 
e.g., fish 
<http://www.calacademy.org/research/ichthyology/catalog/about.html>, 
leafhoppers 
<http://www.sel.barc.usda.gov/selhome/leafhoppers/forHTML/introduction.htm> 
or bacteria <http://www.bacterio.cict.fr/>.  Richard Stafursky maintains a 
text-based data format <http://species.enviroweb.org/text> and a large list 
of taxa in his World Species List <http://species.enviroweb.org/>.

The USDA has an Integrated Taxonomic Information System 
<http://www.itis.usda.gov/access.html> focusing on the biota of North America.

This <http://www.nbii.gov/disciplines/systematics.html> seems like a good 
general links page for biological classifications systematics.

Along with taxonomy, you might be interested in phylogeny as well -- e.g., 
<http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/exhibit/phylogeny.html>, 
<http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/phylogeny.html>.

Pete
<http://www.istori.com/peterkaminski/>



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